This past week we all took a trip to the Renzo Piano designed Parco della Musica to see the Rome Symphony perform. The complex is in northern Rome, close to the Olympic Stadium. It’s a rather beautiful complex of three concert halls that are sheathed in metal as if to look like cicada or beetle shells. Our performance was in the symphony hall, which is the largest of the three shells. It was a Tuesday night but there were multiple performances showing and people abuzz between the sports complexes close by, as there was an A.S. Roma soccer game going on that night as well. A.S. Roma and Lazio are Rome’s two professional soccer clubs, and the city is pretty divided between the two. I was going to design an A.S. Roma soccer stadium as my studio project, but my professor told me I should think of something else – unless it was a Lazio stadium. The symphony performance was beautiful, and a great break from our final week of studio production. It began with a couple of songs accompanied by a pianist, who was apparently so good that the audience applauded him back on the stage three times before intermission. Maybe this is a normal occurrence, but we all found it rather amusing.
